Russia's answer to Terence Conran, Moscow's most successful restaurateur, is as smooth as they come. Arkady Novikov, 46, exudes quiet charisma, dresses like Tom Ford (navy designer jeans; pressed, open-necked shirt) and has the hair and smile of George Clooney. We meet in London in his favourite hang-out, the Blue Bar at the Berkeley Hotel - where he always stays when he's in town.

Novikov is the sort of man for whom life is a parade of luxury. He is in London en route to Italy to check out his latest purchase: Villa Fontanelle, the late Gianni Versace's Lake Como home, 30 miles from Milan, which he bought earlier this year for £26 million. It was reported that he paid £3 million over the asking price to have it taken off the market. 'There's a lot to do. The place needs a lot of renovation,' he smiles, coyly. Fortunately Novikov is not a man who is afraid of hard work.

Russia's so-called 'blini baron' launched his restaurant empire with a loan of $50,000 in the early days of perestroika, shortly after being turned down for a chef's job in the first Moscow branch of McDonald's. Fifteen years on he owns 47 concept restaurants featuring 18 cuisines and employing 13,800 staff. Another three openings are planned for later this year. He also owns Yolki-Palki, a chain of 30 much-loved affordable nostalgic Russian eateries, and counts Putin and his wife as personal friends: he often caters at the Kremlin.

Novikov's personal fortune is unknown, but five years ago Gourmet magazine estimated he was doing about $30 million-worth of business a year. In 2006 the Novikov Restaurant Group listed its revenue as $180 million. Every time he opens a restaurant it instantly becomes the place to go, the road outside blocked with luxury cars, the chauffeurs watching DVDs into the early hours in the back seats while their employers party. GQ Bar, which he opened last year with a permanent staff of 300, remains the hottest venue in town.

When GQ Bar featured on the Manchester United website during Moscow's European Cup in May, it became a place of pilgrimage: British fans drank the ultra-glamorous gentlemen's club dry of lager in the space of an hour, causing chaos and somewhat lowering the designer tone. (Novikov's regulars are more likely to drink Californian chardonnay.) Its popularity is rivalled only by Nedalny Vostok, another recent launch of Novikov, an Asian fusion restaurant whose stylish interior was masterminded by Super Potato, the Japanese cult designers behind Zuma and Roka in London.

Alongside Novikov's home in Sardinia (next door to the villa of Roman Abramovich's girlfriend Daria Zhukova), the Villa Fontanelle project is a treat for all his years of hard work - but it also represents a departure. Because Novikov is taking stock and setting his sights beyond Russia: he is in the early stages of planning an opening in Milan and has his eye ultimately on London. He has already sold off part of the company (shares in Yolki-Palki, his budget chain) to fund his new plans.

Opening restaurants outside Moscow will be a break for him, he jokes, as it's the hardest-partying city in the world. 'Moscow is divided into two halves. People who go to restaurants, dress fashionably and want "tusovka" (a good time). And then there are the people who want to eat. Most Russians put themselves firmly in the first category. That's how we're different to the rest of Europe. When foreigners turn up they are in a state of shock that everything is so glamorous and over the top. Moscow has had a very short time to learn lessons which Europe learnt decades ago. But it is still very much Russia: people dress differently and behave differently. For us, eating out is all about beautiful people wearing beautiful clothes.' And, he could add, splashing lots of cash. As Jay Rayner writes in his chapter on Moscow in The Man Who Ate the World, Moscow is a place where it is 'not uncommon to see someone drop a five-hundred-dollar tip'.

Moscow can be a terrifyingly expensive place to eat out for the penny-pinching foreigner - which is largely down to Novikov. He is playing to a local audience who don't mind paying over the odds - indeed they would be suspicious of anything affordable. Even one of his own staff tells me, 'There is nothing in Moscow for the middle classes.' It is possible to eat affordably at Novikov's restaurants (ie, for about £60 a head) but only if you're very careful what you choose and don't even look at the wine list. If you want an unrestrained pick of the menu, you'll easily drop £100-plus a head without even thinking about it.

The good news is that it's worth it: I have eaten at over a dozen of Novikov's restaurants (usually on a Russian friend's tab) and they always live up to their reputation. I have tried the legendary crispy crab sticks with ginger mayo at Nedalny Vostok and the wild-strawberry soup at Bisquit. I always drink water out of respect for my friends' generosity, though. On my last visit to Nedalny Vostok I noted there was a 2005 Montrachet burgundy on the menu for 59,500 roubles (about £1,200) and one of the cheapest wines was a riesling for 4,900 roubles a bottle (scary enough at £105, thanks).

The people Novikov caters for make up the elite - which is a big class in Moscow, if not the rest of Russia. But he has a democratic side: he invented the concept behind Yolki-Palki, his fast-food chain where a bellyful of borscht, mushroom pies, meat-filled blinis, Russian beer and curd-cheese dessert will set you back less than £10 a head. It is the one place in Moscow where you can order food and drink without fear of bankruptcy. This alone makes you think that Novikov must have a heart.

Versace villas notwithstanding, he does seem to see himself as a man of simple tastes. 'I love bread!' he exclaims, licking his lips and rubbing his belly like a greedy child. 'My mouth is watering just talking about it. Yesterday I had the most delicious tea of bread, butter and honey in one of my restaurants. The bread must have a good crust, though, and it must be rye bread,' he frowns. His favourite foods are from his childhood: sweet black cherries and apricots: 'They were rare delicacies. There was not much fruit around when I was a boy.'

One of Novikov's claims to fame has been to put old Soviet favourites back on the menu: he waxes lyrical about okroshka, a cold soup made with kvass (a mildly alcoholic fermented rye bread drink) and khash, a fatty Armenian dish made with the feet, head and stomach of a cow. 'You must eat it in the morning with garlic and vodka. It's delicious.'

Among his celebrity friends, Novikov has the George Clooney reputation to match the haircut: everyone loves him and declares him the most charming man on the Moscow circuit. But he has another side: his staff know him as exacting and demanding, as one might expect from a man who has played the Alan Sugar role during the first series of The Candidate, Russia's version of The Apprentice. (Interestingly, three years on, the female winner still works in his organisation.) Novikov is also something of a maverick. He famously has no office and works out of whatever restaurant he is most fixated upon at any given moment. He only hired a PR for the first time last year. And it is rumoured that he visits all 47 of his establishments at least once a week, unannounced. (Which is not logistically possible, of course - but the prospect of it must keep people on their toes.)

Novikov's perfectionism came late in life. He grew up with a simmering resentment but no idea of what he wanted to do. His typical Soviet family was, he says, so ordinary that in fact they were probably worse off than most people. 'In those days there were people who were earning decent money and managing to travel. We were not among them,' he says solemnly. His father, who worked in an engineering factory, left when he was very young. He was raised by his mother, a kindergarten teacher, and his grandmother, who first taught him how to cook (reluctantly, as she considered it women's work). 'As a teenager he decided he was vaguely interested in road-building - 'because it seemed like a manly thing to do', he laughs - but failed the exams. In desperation he headed for Cookery School Number 174. 'At last I found something I loved.'

He then spent two years in the army, where he was posted to Georgia and had time to think about his future. 'That was the school of hard knocks. I had to learn how to milk a cow, to scythe grass, to build houses and to shoot guns. I had my own army dog, a German shepherd. Happy days.' Back in Moscow he headed to an economics institute, where he met his wife, the modelesque Nadezhda, who runs Moscow's coolest floristry business, Studio 55. They have been married for 18 years and have a daughter, Aleksandra, 17, who is at school in London, and a son, Nikita, 11, who lives in Moscow.

In his late 20s Novikov slowly worked out the business side of restaurants, gaining experience at Moscow's Hard Rock Cafe. 'I soon discovered that it was not about how good you were but how good your connections were. Then, thankfully, perestroika started.' He found his way into a failing Soviet cooperative and worked his way up to the position of manager. Then, in 1992, came his big break. The man in charge of the cooperative was a player who was expanding into private business: he offered Novikov a loan of $50,000 to set up in new premises.

'To him, it was not a lot of money - he could afford to give it away. To me, it was such a ridiculously large sum of money that I didn't even really think about it. Because it didn't seem real to me. I was young and only now do I realise what a risk it was. I was an adventurer and I had a complete absence of doubt. I just knew in my mind that it was going to be a beautiful restaurant - the most expensive and the best. I was not afraid. The real heroine of the story is the woman responsible for the building who agreed to let us use the space. I have no idea why she took a gamble on me. She is the one I have to thank.'

His first restaurant, Sirene - which is still open - was impossible to manage at first because of the supply problems of the perestroika years: 'There was no food, especially no meat, no forks... It was a nightmare. At first we couldn't actually cook anything at all.' Then he realised he could just send his chefs down to the open-air market to buy everything. And he made it into a seafood restaurant to get round the meat problem.

A second venue, Club T, soon voted Moscow's best French restaurant, opened in an old Soviet furniture shop. Then came the legendary Tsarskaya Okhota (Tsar's Hunt) - a reproduction hunting lodge which served stodgy traditional Russian fare - just what the newly minted Moscow jet set wanted in 1996. After a month it had to close because it was too successful: there were queues every day and they couldn't get the food out of the kitchen fast enough. It re-opened as a help-yourself high-end Russian buffet - which, in a more affordable version, became the model for Yolki-Palki.

One of the secrets of Novikov's success is that he seeks inspiration in Russian traditions and is not overawed by anything outside Moscow. He does love travel and new experiences, though. When asked his favourite cuisine, he lists about 15, from Italian to Japanese: 'I like them all. I don't want to offend anyone.' But he is Russian to his core. His first visit to London in 1995 (his first-ever visit abroad) he remembers as a distinct disappointment.

'We came with a tour group to a horrible hotel next to a cemetery. All the Russian women in our group were wearing their furs and people just stared at us. Londoners dressed very strangely - I remember seeing people wearing platform shoes and with these awful haircuts. I was in shock. We ate at Beefeater and it was terrible.' These days he is more at home here and declares himself obsessed with Pret A Manger, The River Café, The Square and Zuma.

Despite his expansion plans, his comrades are still the Holy Grail of clients for him. 'Russians are the most demanding customers in the world,' he says, wistfully, and with more than a hint of pride. 'They always want the best and they have tried everything. They just love going out.' The problem is, they are so sophisticated now that they are developing more Western tastes. He adds, sadly: 'They don't throw money around in the way they used to, you know.'

Novikov's top 10 favourite restaurants in Moscow

To be fair, it would be almost impossible to choose 10 good restaurants in Moscow that did not belong to Arkady Novikov, seeing as he does have something of a monopoly. So here they are: